Online Video Hosting Stage6.com Shutting Down

What a shock news I read today! Stage6.com a high quality video online hosting is well known with its DivX file format will shut down their operation on 28 February 2008. A post made by Tom (aka Spinner) on 25 February 2008 explains why they are shutting down the website. With the very sort notification a lot of Stage6 user complaint it as you can see it on their reply to the announcement post.

I know Stage 6 for quite some time, almost a year. Within that time Stage 6 has become very popular among online video sharing, because Stage 6 provide high quality videos using DivX format instead of Flash video like YouTube and other video share hosting. What I like from Stage 6 is that you can download the video file by clicking the link they provide, unlike YouTube which need you to install plugin on your Firefox browser to be able to download the .flv file.

From the announcement, it seems that Stage 6 cannot handle the growth of their community. Stage 6 has been providing free membership, why they didn’t think about paid membership? I’m sure it can help a bit to support the operational cost. What I’m thinking is that they actually don’t want to continue the website anymore. I guess the purpose of Stage 6 is to promote DivX format and it did successfully, so there is no reason for them to keep it online. Too bad.. I would like to have Stage 6 still up and running as they are the best in high quality video sharing.